Title: UnderlearningAbstract: We use experimental
methodology to demonstrate from two separate domains (learning segmental
phonology in Turkish and learning inflectional morphology in Romance) that
not every pattern in a language, even if statistically robust or
exceptionless, is actually learned by speakers: unnatural patterns are
underlearned, suggesting that humans may bring formal and substantive biases
to the task of forming grammatical generalisations.

February
23 —
Elissa
Newport
(Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester)

Title:
Statistical language learning: Computational and maturational
constraintsAbstract:
In recent years a number of problems
in the brain and cognitive sciences have been addressed through statistical
approaches, hypothesizing that humans and animals learn or adapt to their
perceptual environments by tuning themselves to the statistics of incoming
stimulation. Professor Newport will present her work on statistical
language learning, showing that infants, young children, and adults can
compute, online and with remarkable speed, how consistently sounds
co-occur, how frequently words occur in similar contexts, and the like, and
can utilize these statistics to find
candidate words in a speech stream, discover grammatical categories, and
acquire simple syntactic structure in miniature languages. Her
recent research has also shown that there are maturational changes in
statistical learning, with children sharpening the statistics and producing
a more systematic language than the one to which they are exposed. These
sharpening processes potentially explain why children acquire language (and
other patterns) more effectively than adults, and also how systematic
languages may emerge in communities where usages are varied and
inconsistent.

Title: What is theory of mind? Concepts, cognitive processes and
individual differences.Abstract: More than thirty years of research has examined “theory of
mind” in non-human animals, human infants, children and adults, and human
brains. This work has led to many insights, but, if anything, the object of
study has become less clear as the weight of evidence has increased. By
turns, researchers conceptualise “theory of mind” as a set of concepts, a
collection of cognitive processes, and an individual difference variable. I
shall argue that these conceptions all have their virtues, but that it is
unhelpful to confound them and probably unwise to try to investigate them
all with the same narrow set of experimental tasks. Newly-emerging methods
have great potential for advancing our understanding of “theory of mind”,
all the more so if we refine our ideas about what we are studying, and why.

Title: Social
motivations in infants and young children: Affiliation, alignment, and
prosocial behaviorAbstract: Humans may be unique among animals in our social
motivations, for example in the extent to which we identify with and wish to
align ourselves with our fellow group members. I show here that these
social motivations are already present in infancy and early childhood. I
present a series of studies on imitation, affiliation, and identification,
which highlight young children’s connections with their social group and
document their early preferential treatment of in- vs. out-group members. A
theme running through many of these studies is the prevalence of prosocial
motivations in children as well, in particular their tendency to help
others. Thus I also take some time to discuss helping in young children,
for example showing how eager children are to help others in general, but at
the same time how children’s tendency to help can be increased further, and
how selective children are regarding whom they help. I conclude that strong
social and prosocial motivations are seen already beginning in infancy.

Title: Understanding the
semantic “stream” of combinatory language comprehension: Evidence of
pervasive, potent, and predictive semantic influences on sentence
processing.Abstract: How does human language comprehension achieve its
hallmark ability to construct an unbounded range of compositional meanings
from a finite (though large) set of individual words? My lab uses
event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to investigate the neurocognitive
processes serving on-line sentence comprehension. ERPs provide sensitivity
to distinct neural processes with millisecond-level temporal resolution and
a limited ability to resolve neuroanatomical sources. Recent findings in our
lab and others’ indicate that semantic knowledge can drive combinatory
interpretations somewhat independently of syntactic analysis, sometimes
overwhelming opposing, unambiguous syntactic cues. Our findings also
indicate that semantic knowledge operates in a predictive manner, allowing
semantic influences on the earliest aspects of the brain’s response to an
incoming word, well within the initial ~200 msec of the onset of the visual
stimulus during reading. I will discuss the implications of these findings
for psycholinguistic models, including classical syntax-first proposals and
recent proposals that emphasize the contributions of semantic knowledge
systems to the computation of combinatory language interpretation.

Title: The Making of Expert Performance by Deliberate
Practice:
Where is the Evidence for Innate Talent ?Abstract: The Greeks used the concept, techne, to refer to
crafts and skills that were associated with creation of reliably superior
products. Later on this concept was extended to include categories of less
reliable performance in law and medicine. Subsequent efforts to develop
expertise promoted extended experience, acquisition of knowledge, general
ability (talent) and advanced schooling. Consistent with this general view
it is often assumed that 10 years of professional experience changes people
into experts. Recent research on expertise, however, is showing that most
forms of experience, such as work, play, and social interactions, have
surprisingly limited effects on improvement of performance. When experts’
performance is measured objectively, we find only limited improvement of
performance as a function of increased experience. In fact, some
professionals’ performance can even decrease with increased amount of
experience. In stark contrast, research on the acquisition of expert
performance demonstrates that focused appropriate training activities--deliberate
practice--can lead to dramatic cumulative increases in performance and
even change the most physical characteristics of the human body and brain
with some exceptions,such as body size and height.
In my talk I will discuss recent evidence on the effects of specific
practice activities on objective performance and propose how everyday
learning phenomena in schools, universities and the professions may be
captured and analyzed in the laboratory and how findings about effective
learning can be translated back into improved training environments that
permit individuals to more effectively improve their performance in the
original settings.